Keep Scotland Beautiful

Keep Scotland Beautiful is the Scottish charity that campaigns, acts and educates on a range of local, national and global environmental issues to change behaviour and improve the quality of people’s lives and the places they care for. Through our work we aim to help people to change the way they think about the environment and encourage them to take action to improve and protect it. Our goal is to make Scotland a cleaner, greener and more sustainable place to live, work and visit.

Our vision: A clean, green sustainable Scotland where people are engaged positively and empowered to take action on local, national and global sustainability issues in order to achieve positive change in behaviour and improve quality of life.

Our mission: Keep Scotland Beautiful is the charity that campaigns, educates and acts on a range of local, national and global sustainability issues. We work collaboratively to achieve positive change; improving people’s quality of life and environment.

Keep Scotland Beautiful and the Sustainable Development Goals

Scotland was one of the first countries in the world to sign up to adopting the Global Goals in 2015. More than 190 countries have now signed up to the vision to end poverty, hunger, inequality and to protect the environment.

Having recognised the strategic importance of the Global Goals to our work, in particular with young people, we seek to play an active role in supporting the targets of all 17 Global Goals.

Across our own activities we have identified where we have the biggest potential to contribute to the 17 Global Goals and their 169 targets.

We recognise:

six goals which we strongly evidence contribution to;

a further six goals which we can evidence a smaller contribution to;

two goals which we don’t contribute to yet, but hope to be able to in the future; and

three goals which we feel we do not actively contribute to.

Our international activity and connections give us the ability to reach a wide ranging audience and we believe it is important for us to demonstrate that our activities contribute to the Global Goals. Going forward we will collate evidence from our activities which demonstrate our support.

We recognise that our charitable activities support some of the goals more strongly than others.

The UK Government’s approach to its Voluntary National Review on the Sustainable Development Goals involves individual departments drafting a Goal review relevant to its policy areas. In this article we capture some of what we know so far and where we can see challenges emerging.

How can we make sure that Government policies are coherent across our economic, social and environmental systems? Prof. Stephen Martin reports on his learning following an OECD event exploring Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development.

What does consumption need to look like in 2030? How do we transform how we live, work and do business? At a workshop with our Partners at Bioregional, we explored the challenges of overconsumption in the UK through the lens of Sustainable Development Goal 12 on a bright morning in November.

Most read

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There is currently no national plan for the Sustainable Development Goals in the UK. We’re going to create it. We've launched an ambitious project to produce the first stakeholder-led national plan for the UK.

As UKSSD publishes a landmark report on the UK’s progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, Emily Auckland, Network Director, says the SDGs are a once in a lifetime opportunity to make the UK a country for everyone.

Statement from our Co-chairs: We welcome the news that the Government intends to share it's progress on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals at the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development in 2019.

There is much to be welcomed in the government’s first attempt at outlining a UK response to the Sustainable Development Goals at home and abroad. Dr Graham Long explores what’s good, and what’s missing, on behalf of UKSSD.